Riyadh al-Azzawi

Riyadh al-Azzawi was an Iraqi intelligence officer and one of the men behind the 1975 OPEC siege.

Biography
Riyadh al-Azzawi worked for Ba'athist Iraq's intelligence services, and in 1975 he masterminded a plan to keep Saudi Arabia and Iran out of Iraq's war with the Kurds. Saudi Arabia and Iran both supported the Peshmerga rebels of Massoud Barzani, and most of their income happened to come from oil; if their delegates to OPEC could be killed, their leadership of OPEC (and OPEC in general) would collapse. al-Azzawi recruited PFLP-EO for this operation, and Carlos the Jackal was chosen as the leader of the operation. Azzawi met him in Vienna, where the OPEC conference was to take place, and he instructed him to kill Saudi Arabian delegate Ahmed Zaki Yamani and Iranian delegate Jamshid Amouzegar. However, the operation went wrong when Carlos killed the Libyan delegate, so he could not reach a safe haven in Tripoli; the hijackers could not make a direct flight to Baghdad, so they were forced to collect ransom money in Algeria instead and release all of the hostages.